Courtney LeBlanc
This Should Be a Metaphor But Isn’t
Every day I walk into the most famous 5-sided building in the world. I pull
on my blazer, swap my flip-flops for flats, scan my badge three times to get
into my office. Each day I walk past the windows that look out over the courtyard
enclosed within the building. It is a tranquil space, the grass a green carpet only
service dogs ever touch; the trees dapple their shade onto the benches below.
It is ringed with magnolia trees, their leaves wide and waxy, and each spring
a mated pair of Cooper’s hawks return to their nest to have babies. Each spring
I watch the baby birds lift their tiny mouths up toward the heavens, crying for
their mother or father or food. They are a bright shine in these dark times, each
Executive Order and memo and headline breaking my hammering heart: the memo
to remove our pronouns from our signature block, the warrior ethos, the bombing
of a boat and its survivors and then an entire country. Each day seems to bring
us closer to the end of our humanity, but each day also brings us closer to the hawks’
return, to the arrival of the tiny babies that capture the attention of everyone who walks
these halls. Yesterday, a day that felt like spring had finally decided to stay, I stood
before the window and stared into the empty air, the thick branches of the trees gone,
last year’s nest and every twig and stick and bit of fabric it contained: disappeared.
I looked down, saw the flat surface of the sawed-off trunk, the workers readying the stump
grinder to chew through what remained. In hours it will be as if it was never there.
They’d like us to forget. They’d like us to think it has always been this way.
“My day job is with the federal government and I work in the Pentagon. I know what I do is important but working under this administration has proved trying in unimaginable ways. When the magnolia tree was cut down, just when spring weather had arrived which would bring the return of the Cooper’s hawks to their nest, something inside of me broke and writing a poem about it was the only way to push through it.” —Courtney LeBlanc
Courtney LeBlanc is the author of the four full-length collections, most recently Her Dark Everything and Her Whole Bright Life (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize). She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate Emerita and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She’s also the founder of the Poetry Coven, a monthly generative workshop. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Find her online at www.courtneyleblanc.com.
